When Evelyn Reeves bought her first rental property in 1969, it felt like freedom. Born in Los Angeles in 1941 to a waitress and a postal worker from Alabama, Reeves purchased this four-unit apartment building for just $1,600 down, thanks to a new federal mortgage program aimed at low-income Black homebuyers. “It was a great program,” she recalled in 2018. “You could go in with almost no money.” Using this property as a source of revenue and as collateral, Reeves acquired a tidy portfolio of assets while making her name as a real estate broker.

Now in her 80s, Evelyn Reeves’s success is almost unfathomable today, where one in four Black American households has zero or even negative wealth to their name. Yet policymakers remain deeply invested in the power of homeownership to reverse the growing racial wealth gap and lift people out of poverty. In 2021, Evanston, Illinois, became the first city to promise “reparations” for decades of racist local policies. Since then, the city has disbursed around $1 million in mortgage assistance and home improvement funds for Black homeowners. Such efforts raise the question: Can the magic of real estate really work for everyone?

Two outstanding new books are the latest to investigate this question. In The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America, the historian Andrew Kahrl reveals how the country’s unjust tax system has long undermined civil rights and Black property ownership. Where Kahrl demonstrates the enormous debt owed to Black Americans, The Residential is Racial: A Perceptual History of Mass Homeownership, by the literary scholar Adrienne Brown, argues that the American dream of homeowning is itself a source of inequality. Building on work by historians such as Destin Jenkins and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, both Kahrl and Brown underscore not only that race is foundational to the workings of real estate, but also the need to imagine ways of living “in excess of ownership,” as Brown writes, where access to safe and stable housing is freed from the logics of dispossession and accumulation alike.

The Black Tax begins in 1865 with general William T. Sherman’s Special Field Order 15, which allocated Confederate lands and livestock along the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina among the formerly enslaved. While President Andrew Johnson reversed Sherman’s order in 1865, less than ten months after it was passed, the promise of “forty acres and a mule” never faded from the Black political imagination. Reconstruction did succeed in creating a progressive tax system, which enabled governments to raise public revenues and redistribute the slavocrats’ wealth. Forced to surrender a larger portion of their ill-gotten gains, however, the planter class made common cause with poor whites by railing against the alleged corruption and profligacy of “Black misrule.” When the last federal troops withdrew from the South in 1877, ending Reconstruction, it signaled the return of the white landowners’ rule.

The overthrow of Reconstruction only renewed African Americans’ dreams of land. Given the sanctity of property in the US legal tradition, land, and the reliable shelter and wealth it promised, seemed to convey a more secure set of rights than the paper protections promised by the Constitution. But while land symbolized self-sufficiency, it offered no relief from the predations of white merchants, bankers, and tax men, whose price-gouging, high interest rates, and onerous assessments drove independent Black farmers into debt and destitution as surely as Klansmen dispossessed them by force. “Probably for every acre owned by a black man to-day,” W. E. B. Du Bois mourned in 1909, “an acre has been lost by some other.”

Acts of “bureaucratic racism” reached new heights in the 1930s. During the Great Depression, public officials foreclosed on Black landowners both to reestablish a landless workforce and to enrich private interests. All over the South, these land-grabbing elites also controlled the flow of federal aid. Under the auspices of the New Deal, white communities received new sidewalks, sewer mains, and swimming pools—all violently enclosed by the color line.

By exposing the fiscal side of white supremacy, The Black Tax recasts Jim Crow as not just a racial system, but an economic one. Over the last decade, scholars including N. D. B. Connolly and Matthew Desmond have shown how racial discrimination—far from being “counterproductive” or “inefficient” from a market standpoint—creates profits, fuels exploitation, and enshrines material inequality. For African Americans, the experience of second-class citizenship was not merely “the indignity of being forced to drink from a ‘colored’ water fountain.” Rather, segregation also ensured that resources extracted on one side of the color line were hoarded on the other. Some Americans enjoyed paved streets, routine trash collection, and working fire hydrants, Kahrl shows, because others were denied these things.

In many places, not much has changed. Under “fiscal apartheid,” Black Americans from Baltimore to Ferguson, Missouri, are denied the mundane infrastructure and essential services that protect and maintain human life—public goods their taxes also pay for. Yet this injustice has always inspired fierce and creative forms of resistance. “Wherever Black people secured a measure of local political power, a fight over tax and spending practices and priorities ensued,” Kahrl observes. One of the book’s best chapters details how Black mayors such as Coleman Young in Detroit and Chicago’s Harold Washington pledged to hike taxes on corporate landowners, only to embrace neoliberal austerity under pressure from bondholders and white flight.

One hundred and fifty years on, how does fiscal apartheid end? A careful historian, Kahrl hesitates to present any sweeping solutions or panaceas in the present. No single set of reforms will fix “the inequitable distribution of public goods” or repay the hundreds of billions owed to Black Americans. Instead, he outlines a few ways to narrow the racial economic divide, such as raising taxes on the “one percent” and standardizing the homeowner property tax exemption. Though some readers may leave wanting a more detailed policy vision, The Black Tax should be received as a call to arms: a searing indictment of American racism and inequality in black and red ink.

Where The Black Tax shines a light on the hidden fiscal machinery of US apartheid, Adrienne Brown’s The Residential Is Racial reveals how literary and print culture made racist housing policies appear both natural and desirable. While urban historians still debate the precise ways that racism segregated America, Brown turns the question on its head. She asks, instead, how did the rise of mass homeownership change popular perceptions of race? And why does the idea of “residential living” project such a powerful allure?

Brown begins the story at the turn of the 20th century, decades before the familiar “redlining” era that dominates some recent popular accounts of segregation. When New Deal agencies excluded Black Americans from federal mortgage programs and postwar suburbs, they in fact reinforced years of racist and eugenic thinking in the private sector. The National Association of Real Estate Boards, founded in 1908, required its members to observe the color line or be expelled. Its publications, meanwhile, extolled the healthful qualities of rolling lawns with white picket fences for Anglo-Saxon men made sick and weak by crowded, multiethnic cities.

Despite the real estate lobby’s best efforts, only in the interwar era—a period of global political upheaval—did homeownership become a matter of the national interest. As Secretary of Commerce and later president, Herbert Hoover issued speeches and policies promoting homeownership as the universal ambition of white male wage earners. Access to real estate would inoculate American workingmen against the dangers of “Bolshevism”—a threat closely associated with Jews and other “undesirable” immigrants—and the tramps, agitators, and bomb throwers of the Industrial Workers of the World. By equating private property with Americanism, officials in Washington enforced the idea of homeownership as both a patriotic virtue and a marker of white respectability.

Black Americans have long envisioned a future in which political rights and access to public goods are disentangled from private property.

Yet the Great Depression also challenged Americans’ faith in free enterprise. Fear of foreclosure stalked popular culture, from Broadway plays and Betty Boop cartoons to “the home-threatening tornado” of The Wizard of Oz. Ultimately, stories of dispossession reinforced the homeownership ideal, Brown contends, while drowning out the progressives and socialists calling for alternatives such as public housing.

Take John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, which, for all the leftist bona fides of its author, reads as a fable about racial and “residential longing.” Coming out of the Depression, and especially after World War II, countless families realized the Joads’ dream of landed independence, trading the novel’s agrarian setting for homes and mortgages in the suburbs. Thanks to federal subsidies and the GI Bill, the same abstract financial forces that dispossessed the Joads now worked their magic for real-life Okies and other new—and often newly white—homeowners.

In this way, popular narratives laid the groundwork for a postwar “dream of residential whiteness.” At the same time, overt racism became less publicly acceptable; increasingly, the supposed rationality of “the market” disguised the denigration of Blackness in the civil rights era. For this reason, Brown looks skeptically upon the canon of anti-racist art from this period, which struggled to represent the hidden, bureaucratic maintenance of the color line. Consider Norman Rockwell’s New Kids in the Neighborhood, from 1967, in which three white kids peer at a Black brother and sister whose family has just moved in. The illustration suggests, optimistically, that the children’s innocent curiosity might supersede the hatreds of the adult world around them. In this way, Brown argues, Rockwell mistakes segregation as a problem of individuals. While appeals to white sympathy might change a few “hearts and minds,” the artist’s invitation to look is ultimately a misdirection.

Together these books raise the question: Can the magic of the market ever work for everyone?

Evelyn Reeves has long thought so. Over 50 years of renting and selling Los Angeles real estate has afforded her both wealth and endless opportunities to preach the value of Black capitalism. As the former president of the National Association of Real Estate Brokers, her message found an eager audience in the aftermath of the 1992 LA riots. “We need black ownership, not just jobs” she implored. “Blacks have lived in this community 25 to 30 years and we don’t have a lot to show for it.”

Reeves was right, of course. By the 1990s, the stunning success of a few individuals had hardly improved the circumstances of the Black poor and working class. But around the country, policymakers began to work overtime to make homeownership more attainable. Bill Clinton’s “National Homeownership Strategy,” unveiled in 1995, pledged to create 8 million new homeowners by 2000. For Clinton, like Herbert Hoover before him, access to real estate was a moral issue as much as an economic one. Except now, with the Soviet Union dead and buried, the focus shifted from battling Bolshevism to saving the underclass. “You want to reinforce family values in America, encourage two-parent households, get people [women] to stay home? Make it easy for people to own their own homes,” Clinton opined.

Neoliberal housing policies, combined with Wall Street deregulation, produced a homebuying frenzy in the new millennium. Yet Black and low-income borrowers entered the market on highly predatory terms, locked into risky, “subprime” mortgages whose main purpose was speculation. As Kahrl observes, these “new, untapped markets” consisted of “people and places that had historically been denied access to home financing, who longed for the financial security and wealth-building capacity of homeownership.”

The era of mass homeownership had arrived: a monument to “free enterprise” built on a mountain of bad debt. The crash that followed was therefore not an aberration. It was not the unintended consequence of an otherwise sensible policy goal. Rather, the foreclosure crisis in Black America was the logical endpoint of the overemphasis on homeownership, and an economy fueled by theft.

The history of race and real estate in the United States is proof that homeownership is neither a reliable source of wealth nor a vehicle for Black liberation. Mere access to the marketplace is a poor substitute for the equitable distribution of resources; a mortgage can lift a household into the middle class—or cast a family into ruin. But more than this, policies that heavily subsidize homeowners do so at the expense of the poor and unpropertied. For every dollar of tax relief that flows to renters, Washington lavishes six dollars on homeowners. And by design, it’s the wealthy who receive the biggest deductions.

In our homeownership society, real estate will always be a relentless driver of inequality—a Ponzi scheme that concentrates the greatest wealth and opportunities in the hands of a lucky few. And yet, on both sides of the color line, to own one’s home remains synonymous with freedom.

If there’s another lesson to be drawn from this history, it’s that Black Americans have long envisioned a future in which political rights and access to public goods are disentangled from private property. The Black pursuit of “freedom from kleptocracy,” as Kahrl shows, has inspired community land trusts, organizing against foreclosures, refusals to pay unjust property taxes, and experiments in participatory budgeting. In a brief epilogue, Brown similarly shines a light on the rebellious legacy of Black cooperatives, rent parties, and other collective responses to poverty and the threat of displacement. From these seemingly disparate endeavors, a picture begins to emerge: a society in which security and shelter for some no longer depend on the violent exclusion or exploitation of others.

Taking a cue from Brown’s “perceptual history,” what does a truly just provision of resources look like? For one possible answer, picture the National Mall in Washington. In spring 1968, over 3,000 Americans descended and set up camp on the “nation’s front lawn,” where Martin Luther King had delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington. Dubbed “Resurrection City,” the weekslong encampment was the brainchild of the recently assassinated King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The sprawling tent city would focus national attention on the nascent Poor People’s Campaign and its demand for a major federal investment in low-income housing. Volunteers built working systems for water, electricity, and sanitation, alongside free health clinics and even a modest “City Hall.”

The experiment failed. The makeshift city collapsed under the combined weight of poor planning and heavy rain. Police arrested nearly 300 mud-soaked occupants. Still, Resurrection City is a reminder that homeowning has not always meant “the natural horizon of citizenship.” Even the encampment’s organizers were surprised by the thousands of poor people who arrived, “propelled by the belief that there must be a better way to live beyond the forms that had so far failed them.”

In one photograph from the encampment, an elderly man, a veteran, holds up a handmade sign. We would do well to look closely at what it says: “Happiness is / a warm dry house / no rats or roaches / lots of good food.”

At a recent campaign event in Whitehall, Montana, the Republican US Senate candidate Tim Sheehy told voters that a decade ago, when he set up the aerial firefighting company through which he made his fortune, he and his wife were living “below the poverty line”.

“My wife and I homeschool our kids,” Sheehy said. “We made that decision several years ago. She’s a Marine, naval academy graduate, she could have a great job and even when our company was tiny, and we … were below the poverty line and making no money, we said: ‘No … the most important job in the world is being a mother.’ And she’s doing that every day.”

A little more than a month from election day, in a race that could decide control of the Senate, such hardscrabble tales are helping Sheehy lead the Democratic incumbent, Jon Tester, a longtime Montana farmer. The two men are due to debate in Missoula on Monday night.

But Sheehy’s claim about living in poverty while building his company, Bridger Aerospace, is contradicted by his own memoir.

In that book, Mudslingers, published last year, the former navy Seal writes that when he and his wife contemplated leaving the military, in 2013, they “weren’t wealthy, but … did have resources”.

This, he writes, was in part thanks to having “lived quite frugally during our time in the military, spending a lot of time deployed, accumulating savings, taking advantage of base housing and meals, and of course spending almost nothing while on deployment.

“So, we had amassed a nest egg of close to $300,000. I also had some money that my parents had been putting away for me since I was a kid. All told, we had roughly $400,000 to allocate toward building a business and establishing a new life.”

In 2014, as Sheehy got his company going, the US health department defined the poverty guideline for a family of three in Montana as $19,790. The poverty threshold, as defined by the US Census Bureau, was $19,055.

By his own account, Sheehy set out to build Bridger Aerospace with 20 times that – a sum he calls “not exactly chump change”.

Sheehy has also regularly claimed to have “bootstrapped” his company, a term the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines as “to promote or develop by initiative and effort with little or no assistance”.

Yet in his book, Sheehy describes both receiving the $100,000 his parents had saved for him and asking his father and brother to help him pay $500,000 to buy necessary planes. His father, he writes, “backed me, financially and emotionally, without expecting anything in return”, while his brother was given an “equity stake in the business”.

Sheehy also describes how in 2017 his brother helped secure investment from Blackstone Group, the New York private equity behemoth led by Stephen Schwartzman, a top Republican donor, in order to pull off a $200m aircraft order.

Sheehy grew up in Minnesota and attended the US Naval Academy in Maryland. Describing his early days in Montana, he has often told of how he, his wife and their first child started out living in a tent. That might boost his claim of living below the poverty line, but Sheehy has also described how living under canvas was a choice.

Having purchased “60 undeveloped acres”, Sheehy writes in his book, “the simple and probably sane thing to do would have been to rent an apartment in town while we got the business off the ground”. But they chose to build a house, and to camp while the structure went up.

Sheehy’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment. News of Sheehy’s book contradicting his own claim about living in poverty, however, follows similar reporting regarding his claims about his background.

The Montana Free Press was among outlets to report that though Sheehy has said he grew up in “rural Minnesota … surrounded by farmland”, he in fact “grew up in a multimillion-dollar lake house, learned to fly under the tutelage of a neighbour, [and] attended a private high school”.

In May, the Daily Beast reported that Sheehy’s campaign trail claims about how he left the US military do not match those in his book. Sheehy’s campaign responded angrily, claiming an attack on his patriotism and service. Then, this month, the Guardian reported documents seemingly showing Sheehy did not follow Department of Defense protocol for clearing sections of Mudslingers that deal with military subjects, including deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. The campaign did not respond.

Regardless, Sheehy seems well-placed to secure a Senate seat, holding seven- and eight-point leads over Tester, a three-term moderate Democrat.

Federal figures regarding poverty in Montana in 2014 do back up one claim in Sheehy’s book. Describing how he hired his first employees, he says he paid just $1,500 a month, amounting to $18,000 a year, to his first chief pilot, Tim Cherwin.

Cherwin brought with him “the chain-smoking desert rat Steve Taylor, who would become our director of maintenance”. Sheehy, who says he started the business with $400,000, says both men were “earning wages below the poverty line”.

In February 1975 the New Zealand writer Janet Frame was the subject of a rare interview for television conducted by the journalist Michael Noonan. This relaxed, intimate retrospective of her life and work – Frame and Noonan stroll, laughing together, at the height of summer along a sea-swept beach near her then home on the Whangaparāoa Peninsula, north of Auckland – was made as part of a project to mark the United Nations’ International Women’s Year. Frame would turn 51 that August; on screen she comes across as confident, relaxed, witty and thoughtful, far removed from the introverted and reclusive former psychiatric patient portrayed in Jane Campion’s 1990 film An Angel at My Table. Based on Frame’s bestselling autobiography, it is a legend-enforcing depiction of how Frame transformed her early background of poverty, tragedy and mental illness into literature. The New York Times obituary published the day after her death from leukaemia on 29 January 2004 would categorise Frame in its headline as a “writer who explored madness”.

Frame, whose centenary is celebrated this month with events in the UK and New Zealand, was indubitably a writer “who explored madness”, and yet so much more – internationally renowned, strikingly original and unclassifiable, a dazzling interpreter of and innovator in language, a shrewd investigator of the postcolonial world and New Zealand’s projected image of itself. She was a linguistic explorer into the many meanings of that island nation – for both Māori and settler – and an antidote to the “Man Alone” nationalist realist tradition of Pākehā (white European) male writers that dominated New Zealand literature of the early to mid-20th century.

Her early fiction is imbued with the poetry she learned by rote at school, where she was a gifted scholar – Keats, Shelley, John Greenleaf Whittier – and by the plays on the wireless that she listened to avidly with her siblings. It is suffused with popular culture, and the domestic vernacular and public vocabulary of working-class, small‑town New Zealand during the depression and second world war, as well as that of the postwar England of the late 1950s and early 60s, where she lived for seven years, with its bitter cold and even more bitter dislocations.

In its structure and strangeness her work bears the hallmark of writers as diverse as Stevie Smith, TS Eliot and Virginia Woolf, yet displays a fabular intensity all of its own. Its spiky, mischievous, often macabre and highly personalised humour looks forward to Muriel Spark, Jenny Diski, Siri Hustvedt and Alison Moore. Frame is the only New Zealand writer to have won individual national awards across all four categories: for her poetry, short stories, novels and autobiography. She took the Commonwealth Writers’ prize in 1988 for her novel The Carpathians, was awarded a CBE in 1983, was an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1990 made Member of the Order of New Zealand, the country’s highest civil honour. Her champions include Hilary Mantel, Anita Brookner, Doris Lessing and Michael Holroyd, who described An Angel at My Table (its three volumes were collectively published under this title in 2008) as “one of the greatest autobiographies written this century”, with the Australian Nobel laureate Patrick White pronouncing it as “among the wonders of the world”. According to New Zealand author Eleanor Catton, winner of the 2013 Booker prize, “any one of her books could be published today and it would be groundbreaking”.

Her achievements are all the more remarkable because she might never have survived to write at all. Janet Paterson Frame was born on 28 August 1924 in Dunedin in New Zealand’s South Island, the third of five children, to George, a railway worker, and Lottie, who was before her marriage a housemaid – including employment in the household of Katherine Mansfield, still possibly New Zealand’s best-known literary export. Frame’s parents were of Scottish descent. “I come from a writing family: my mother sold her poems from door to door,” she comments unselfconsciously in that 1975 TV interview. Due to the peripatetic nature of their father’s job, she and her siblings grew up in various coastal towns, in ramshackle houses without running water or electricity, principally in Oamaru, immortalised as “Waimaru” in her subsequent fiction.

Life was typically tough, and impoverished, made worse by the alarm of the only boy, Geordie, being diagnosed with epilepsy at the age of eight. The four girls shared one bed. Daily chores included milking cows and carrying water; kittens were dispatched in a sack. (Frame’s fiction is full of such matter-of-fact incidents; and of flooded creeks swelled with the bloated bodies of dead sheep and cows.) The children ran wild outdoors in the bush “past orchards and farms, paddocks filled with cattle, sheep, wheat, gorse, and the squatters of the land who were the rabbits eating like modern sculpture into the hills,” she wrote in one of her best-known stories, The Reservoir. They devoured any reading material, entered writing competitions, and were entranced by cinema, longing to go to Hollywood and become film stars. School was both a torment to socially awkward Janet, who stood out with her shock of flaming red hair, and also a release: academically she excelled.

The family was convulsed by the double tragedy of losing two of the girls, Myrtle and Isabel, in separate accidents a decade apart. Both sisters drowned, as a result of the same heart condition. These terrible losses deeply affected Frame. While she was working as a trainee teacher, she attempted to take her own life, and as a result was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia. She would be in and out of psychiatric hospitals for eight years, where she was subjected to countless sessions of ECT and insulin shock therapy.

Frame stated in her autobiography: “It is little wonder that I value writing as a way of life when it actually saved my life.” A volume of short stories, The Lagoon, had been published in 1951. The following year it won the Hubert Church Memorial prize, which was New Zealand’s only literary award. Frame had never heard of it; the previous winner was Frank Sargeson, who, after Frame was eventually discharged from hospital in 1955, lent her his garden shed, where she would live and work for two years on her first novel, the modernist Owls Do Cry (1957). The prize came in the nick of time, as Frame was scheduled for a leucotomy, otherwise known as a prefrontal lobotomy. If this had gone ahead she would quite probably have remained incarcerated in the psychiatric system and never published anything else.

“The leucotomies were silent, docile,” she wrote in An Angel at My Table. “Their eyes were large and dark and their faces pale with damp skin. They were being ‘retrained’ to fit in to the ‘everyday world’ always described as ‘outside’.”

Several years later, when a psychiatrist at the Maudsley in south London told her what she already knew – that she had depression, and had never been schizophrenic – she would, with his encouragement, write about her experiences in her 1961 novel Faces in the Water, “to give me a clearer view of the future”. As Istina Mavet, the protagonist of the novel, explains: “I did not know my own identity. I was burgled of body and hung in the sky like a woman of straw.” Frame’s entire work was concerned with a sense of such violent depersonalisation – what she termed the “homelessness of self”.

But her niece, close friend and literary executor, Pamela Gordon (daughter of Frame’s youngest sister, June) urges readers to focus less on the adversities catalogued in Frame’s biography, and concentrate on the work. “I have spent my life observing the intense attention that her brilliant writing attracted from the very beginning of her long and remarkable career. And I also noted the envy that her achievements elicited from some of her contemporaries,” she says.

“Over all those decades her reputation suffered, especially in New Zealand, from that unfortunate cultural cringe we call here the ‘tall poppy syndrome’. Some of her many successes were hampered by the effects of misogyny, class prejudice, and malicious gossip. These factors are still in play posthumously but I feel they are becoming less powerful. Janet Frame was aware of all this negativity but she believed in the long game.”

Emily Perkins, who this year won New Zealand’s top fiction prize, the Ockham, for her novel Lioness, said: “You can’t help but be penetrated by her intelligence and attunement to the sensory world, just as you can’t help being profoundly moved by her hotline to the beauty, bewilderment and dread of childhood. Her writing can seem like a paradox – she’s an immensely socially astute writer of alienation and a masterful poet of wordlessness. She can make intensely private interior worlds bloom in the reader’s mind.”

Catherine Chidgey, author most recently of The Axeman’s Carnival, said she stored Frame’s “depictions of Aotearoa [the Māori name for New Zealand] in my blood, a beautiful place, a foreboding place, where the natural world is never far from the domestic”.

Kirsty Gunn, whose latest collection of short fiction is Pretty Ugly, recalls: “My mother introduced me to the work of Frame when I was about 12. I remember how, at that age, Owls Do Cry seemed to be delivered straight into my bloodstream as a kind of racing, trippy experience of pure feeling – like nothing else I’d ever known. I was hooked. Before then, I hadn’t thought of novels being made out of outsider lives.”

In 1957 Frame left for Europe with the aid of a grant from the New Zealand Literary Fund. She had mixed experiences, both personally and professionally, in England, and in Ibiza, where she would live for a year. In her posthumously published novella Towards Another Summer (2008), her character, the writer Grace Cleave, enduring the very cold winter of 1962-63, undergoes a “roots crisis” all too familiar to Frame and other exiles from home.

Frame’s third novel, The Edge of the Alphabet (1962), is this month republished by Fitzcarraldo to commemorate the centenary of Frame’s birth. In it three people meet on board a ship as they leave New Zealand and set off for England and London, a city “covered in antimacassars of fog”: the epileptic Toby Withers (who appears in Frame’s debut, Owls Do Cry), on his first journey overseas; English schoolteacher Zoe Bryce; and jovial but controlling Irishman Pat Keenan – all are uneasy, lonely, marginal. The key question of the novel is “how can one really identify oneself, living so close to the edge of the alphabet?”

It is the most Woolfian of Frame’s work: with intense, often dissociated separate monologues and repeated imagery of light, sounds and shapes evoking the waves, and the long, turbulent journey by sea of Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out. Frame even uses Woolf’s trick of killing off a main character to release the others to life. (Margaret Drabble has remarked: “I sometimes think it’s an accident of geography and history and social class that Janet Frame isn’t as well known as Virginia Woolf.”) Publishing the novel has been something of a labour of love for Fitzcarraldo’s publicity director, Clare Bogen, who has a New Zealand background.

“Frame was my first experience of the unhomely in literature,” she says. “The Edge of the Alphabet is explicitly about language and the breakdown of language. Frame isn’t scared of leaving her reader behind in unusual formatting or by introducing layers of metafiction.”

Other centenary celebrations include a special Curzon cinema screening of An Angel at My Table in London in September, a writers’ tribute event at the annual Word Christchurch festival in New Zealand on Frame’s 100th birthday, and a “Reading Janet Frame” symposium in the city of her birth, Dunedin. Virago Modern Classics, which publishes many of her novels and stories, is also reissuing the autobiography in a new edition. “I hope that the spotlight on Frame this year will inspire another generation of readers to discover her visionary voice,” says editorial director Olivia Barber.

For Frame, it was always about the writing. In The Edge of the Alphabet, Toby and Zoe wonder if they, too, could be writers. “Shall I write a book?” ponders Zoe. “Shall I engage in private research of identity?” Toby tells everyone he meets of his plans for a book about a “lost tribe”, and while he cannot even spell his own name, his “pedantic” dreams are masterpieces of eloquence. Living in the Maniototo, Frame’s 1979 novel, continues this theme of selfhood. It is vintage Frame: a work both of social satire and “journeys toward that are believed to be journeys away from, and journeys away that are really journeys within”.

It was the success of her autobiography – written, so she said, “to set the record straight” – that would give her financial security. Its bestseller status and the ensuing Campion film brought publicity to the very private Frame, and has somewhat eclipsed her in the public eye, at least, as a fiction writer. Frame had returned to New Zealand to live permanently in 1963, though she also took up residencies in the US at Yaddo and MacDowell from 1967, which provided enriching friendships and new adventures. After a long period in the North Island, she moved back to the South Island in 1997, where she died in Dunedin. It is there, at the edge of the world, the edge of the alphabet, in “the long shadows of the Southland twilight”, that Frame’s extraordinary vision lives on, “the moments hanging ripe, like red currants”.